Perspectives on the beautiful game of soccer; fueled by enormous amounts of coffee

Friday, April 18, 2008

Chihuahua... California.... what's the difference?

I keep tabs on seven Americans who ply their trade in Mexico but there are more within the youth ranks of Mexican clubs. It's difficult to find information on them and sometimes it's just a matter of scrolling through rosters and mining for gold. But one player who I know is down there is Carlos Borja. It's not a secret really, as Mural wrote about him soon after the story of Jesus Padilla's actual birthplace came out.

So I searched for Borja's bio on the Mexican federation web site and, after some extensive seraching, found it. I was surprised to see the birthplace that accompanied Borja's bio.

Although no one is contesting Borja's American birth - he was born in Orange, Calif. - it seems that somehow his birthplace was still an issue to somebody.

Unlike Padilla, Borja has not denied his American birth as far as I know. The good folks down with Mural uncovered Borja's information without our help. I was talking to one of their editors the day after the Padilla news broke and he asked me if I'd ever heard of Carlos Borja.

Now, I'm not going to speculate about why Borja's birthplace shows up as Chihuahua, Chihuahua. Who knows what sort of paperwork was used to register him with the federation. Padilla's paperwork was never made public to my knowledge and since he's pretty much out of sight at this point few people would probably care to find that out right now. But somewhere along the line some misinformation was given with regards to Borja.

Who knows? Maybe I'm the only one who cares about Borja's bio. No one may care about a Chivas San Rafael player's birthplace. Even still, thought I'd just present this to our readers so everyone make their own conclusions about this.